Latin America. Storage options for small and medium-sized businesses used to be limited, but now there are many alternatives and challenges.
Storage is often a matter of scale and perspective. While the storage requirements of a very large company may demand massive, high-performance arrays, logically small companies have more modest needs.
But storage to support business operations is the same regardless of the number of people on payroll, the square footage of the office, or how many digits the annual revenue is.
That's because data is the fuel of businesses of all sizes today, and it denotes how well that data is managed, protected, and used will likely affect a company's success or failure. So even though small businesses have smaller amounts of data, their storage concerns and interests are by no means smaller than those of a large company.
For some time there was a gap between storage offerings. Most major vendors focused their efforts on creating enterprise-class products, while at the lower end of the spectrum, consumer-facing vendors offered network storage staples designed for very small businesses. As a result, a large number of small to medium-sized businesses went unnoticed.
But now, the needs of these companies are on a more recognized plane, and the gap is being filled with high-end and low-end storage providers.
That's the good news. The wider selection of storage products for small to medium-sized businesses also brings with it a new set of challenges. While the data storage needs of these companies are comparable to those of large enterprises, the IT resources and expertise they have available are not.
Still, small to medium-sized businesses may still need many of the same sophisticated tools and features in their network storage that businesses require. This is being covered as storage vendors strive to remove some of the operational complexities from their products aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, with innovations such as configuration wizards, easy-to-use management interfaces, and direct-swap hardware components.
Newer options like online (or cloud) storage services provide even more alternatives for small to medium-sized businesses. An online backup service, for example, can help a business with limited resources by providing effective and cost-effective data protection for backups and disaster recovery. Other services offer the advantages of network storage without having to effectively install and maintain hardware locally.
These services are convenient, scalable, and offer some services that might otherwise be out of reach for a smaller company.
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